"There's nothing left to stick us now. Once I get this cell the way I want it, we'll start manufacturing, for all we're worth. In less than six months we'll be filling contracts here in America. Two months later we'll be introducing into seven different countries in Europe a fully protected and patented transmitting camera as far ahead of the old-fashioned photophone as a Bell telephone is ahead of a tin speaking-tube."
"I know, Jim; but you must be more careful! You must, in some way, stop working so hard!"
"Who could help it, at this sort of work?" he protested, contentedly. She felt that he, too, had stumbled upon that timeless and mysterious paradox of existence, that incongruous law which ordains that as one surrenders and relinquishes and gives, so one shall live the richer and deeper.
"I tell you, Frank," her husband was saying, "the more I know of electricity the more I bow down before it, in wonder, the prouder I am to be mixed up in its mysteries! Just think of what it's come to be, this thing we call Electricity, since the day primitive man first rubbed a piece of amber and beheld the puny miracle of magnetic attraction! Why, today it harnesses tides and waterfalls, and tames and orders force, and leaves power docile and patient, swinging meek and ready from a bit of metal thread! It lightens cities, at a turn of the wrist; it hurls your voice half way round the world, it guides sailors and measures and weighs the stars; it threads empires together with its humming wires; it's the shuttle that's woven all civilization into one compact fabric! It's the light of our night-time, and the civilizer of our world. It explodes mines, and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death through a thousand miles of sea, and yet it's the very tongue of our world! It prints and carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupendous tasks, and then it stoops to the most delicate work!"
"And it lets me ring you up, my beloved own, and hear your voice, your living voice!" Even beyond her laughter he could catch the rapt note as she spoke. He responded to that note by catching at her gloved hand, and keeping it in his gratefully.
"Yes, but it does even more than annihilate space and turn wheels and despatch trains. Think what it's doing with wireless alone! And that is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used—and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown—as unknown as God!—and almost as mysterious!"
"Oh!" she reproved.
"I've sometimes wondered if those lightning flashes and those terrifying things that used to fill the temples in the Eleusinian Mysteries didn't simply mean that those old priests of Apollo knew more about electric currents than we imagine."
"And even Jove's bolts were only electricity, weren't they?" she assented. "So you're right, in a way—their god and their power were electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!"
"No, it's older than Prometheus, it's older than Adam, it's mixed up in some way with the very origin of life itself! It's the most mysterious thing in the world—and the most beautiful!" he concluded, with solemn conviction.